KIRKUS REVIEW

Green
draws on his experience with the Auxiliary Fire Service in this intricate 1943
novel about waiting for and living through the London Blitz.

When
Richard Roe joined up with the AFS, nine months before Britain entered WWII, he
never expected war would really occur; when it does come, his
company braces for raids but is met instead by near-endless tedium, packed
into an overheated substation, playing workplace politics, waiting for hellfire
to rain from the sky. Roe's situation is complicated by an incident involving his
subofficer Pye's sister, who abducted Roe's son as he stood
dazzled in the stained-glass light of a toy shop, "a permanence
of sapphire in shopping hours." This is the merest taste of Green's
descriptive spellcasting, his almost psychedelic sketches of varying
qualities of light and the emotional, sensory, and psychological effects of
color. With his sister confined to a psychiatric institution to avoid
prosecution, Pye wonders, finally, if he played a part in her
deteriorating mental state. Roe's wife and son, meanwhile, have been evacuated
to his childhood home. He visits them infrequently, on a slow
train scoring a line along which he makes a clean break between his
existence in London, where he gives in to the frenzied lusts of wartime with
Hilly, the station's mess manager, and his familial life in the
country, where he is overwhelmed with love for his wife. The two seemingly
disparate states are not at odds in his mind, true to Green's deep
understanding of the protean, multilayered nature of human
existence. Green's acrobatic syntax yields not an easy reading
experience but a rewarding one, as he weaves multiple narratives over and
through one another, reeling among perspective shifts, zigzagging through
clouds of memory and conjecture. At last comes the final
conflagration, which does not kill but consumes Roe, rising up in a blaze of
heat and color, death and danger.

Dense
and often funny, this reissue is necessary reading for fans of both Green
and modernist fiction.

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